Dominic Hamdy has emerged as one of the most dynamic young restaurateurs in London, having opened five restaurants in seven years. Over lunch at his latest venue, Canal in Westbourne Grove, he told Harden’s why he believes hospitality is so important today – and why he’s in it for the long haul
HARDEN’S: Dominic, congratulations, this is a wonderful spot. Can we go back to the beginning: you were still a student when you started making Scotch eggs to sell at Berwick Street Market. Was that just a student side-hustle to make some money, or a calculated career move?
DOMINIC HAMDY: Well, I was a third-year student studying French & German here in London, at UCL, when we started Scotchtails. And there was certainly no grand plan to go into hospitality.
A stall at a food market wasn’t something that required a degree, so I did internships at law firms and so on. My dad is a surgeon; I had been to university, so a career in hospitality wasn’t really on the agenda. In fact it took quite a few years for him to come round to it. But the idea of sitting in front of a computer in an air-conditioned office for 50 hours a week had no appeal for me: I’d prefer to be working in a coffee shop. I feel very fortunate to be doing something I enjoy.
People still don’t regard hospitality as a worthy career, and that’s something we really want to change. If people are ambitious to earn six-figure salaries – well, you can earn that in restaurants as well. We want to be a really great hospitality employer, and we have taken cues from the corporate world to make that happen by introducing benefits like private health care, pensions and so on – as well as creating places we hope people want to work in.
It sounds like you are optimistic about the future of the industry, despite all its well- documented problems.
Yes, I am optimistic. In an increasingly digital world I feel very strongly that restaurants facilitate human contact. It’s as simple as that.
Technology is all about reduction, about efficiency and speed. Restaurants are almost the opposite. They are all about celebrating time together – and there are a reducing number of experiences that facilitate that sort of connection between people.
There is a lot of discussion around distraction, wellness and mindfulness – the act of being present in the moment. Well, there is nothing during which you can be more present than feeding yourself, while making conversation. So we in restaurants do much more than nourish people, we offer them the opportunity to connect.
My wife is a GP, and by the end of her day she has been jumping through hoops trying to limit each consultation to 10 minutes. We in hospitality have the privilege of spending an hour and 45 minutes nourishing and caring for people – I feel quite passionate about that.
You transformed Scotchtails, which ceased production in 2020, into a restaurant group that now has five venues. How did that come about?
We wanted a bricks-and-mortar site and specialist coffee was just coming in, so we developed a Scandinavian-style coffee chop concept – Lundenwic, in Covent Garden, which we have since sold. Then we were looking for another coffee shop and found the site off Crispin Street in Spitalfields that morphed into Crispin.
Crispin opened seven years ago this month. It took some time to mould it into what it is now, but it also defined what we do. After a lot of twists and turns – and luck does come into it at times – we have had the opportunity to grow a lot in the last five years.
You now have three venues under the ‘Crispin’ brand and two under different names. I take it you are creating a group rather than a chain. So what are your ambitions in the next five to ten years, and beyond?
I’ve got no interest in rolling out a chain that can be sold to private equity. But we’re very interested in opening more restaurants – I want each one to have its own identity, and the thread that will run through all of them is the ingredients and the approach behind them.
There’s no specific ten-year plan apart from becoming a better company to work for, but we will respond to opportunities that come our way. At the moment we are looking at opening a deli, and ultimately we would like to grow our own produce.
We’re probably done with 1,000sq ft restaurants with 45 covers – small restaurants. We can’t really go as far as we want to at this scale, with things like whole animal butchery or making our own dough. Bigger venues are more ambitious and need a longer lead time, so the number of new openings will slow down, but I hope the scale of the ambition will increase.
I’d like to create restaurants that are around for a very, very long time, and which don’t lose their magic – restaurants like the River Café. As we keep opening, if we take the learnings from each site, each one that follows is going to be better than the one before. For instance, I doubt if we’ll use metal table tops again – these tables at Canal will be cold to the touch in the winter, compared with wood.
I’m 33 now, and I hope that at 53 I will be opening the best restaurant I have ever opened.
Thanks very much Dominic – we’ll look forward to that!
Dominic Hamdy is the founder & managing director of HAM Restaurants.
Current portfolio:
Bistro Freddie, EC2
Crispin, E1
Bar Crispin, W1B
Crispin at Studio Voltaire, SW4.
Canal, W9, is in partnership with Mason & Fifth boutique hotel.
